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The Motley Fool

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bluedonkey
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The Motley Fool

#388025

Postby bluedonkey » February 19th, 2021, 6:04 pm

I've only recently realised that there are now forums again on TMF. I left there when those were closed down. How do they compare to this site? Just wondering if it's worth me looking in there as well as here. Any opinions/pointers welcome.

swill453
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388030

Postby swill453 » February 19th, 2021, 6:26 pm

bluedonkey wrote:I've only recently realised that there are now forums again on TMF. I left there when those were closed down. How do they compare to this site? Just wondering if it's worth me looking in there as well as here. Any opinions/pointers welcome.

Is that not the US version of Motley Fool? Their boards never went away.

Scott.

SalvorHardin
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388042

Postby SalvorHardin » February 19th, 2021, 7:31 pm

bluedonkey wrote:I've only recently realised that there are now forums again on TMF. I left there when those were closed down. How do they compare to this site? Just wondering if it's worth me looking in there as well as here. Any opinions/pointers welcome.

If you're referring to the links in a recent post of mine on the Scottish Mortgage thread, they are links to tge forums on the original (American) Motley Fool site.

That site never closed its forums.

As far as I am aware, TMF UK doesn't have forums for non-paying users

bluedonkey
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388045

Postby bluedonkey » February 19th, 2021, 8:14 pm

Ahhh, I see, said the blind man.

Urbandreamer
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388052

Postby Urbandreamer » February 19th, 2021, 9:02 pm

bluedonkey wrote:Ahhh, I see, said the blind man.


A brief explanation. When TMF began in the 90's, a generation ago, I remember. Everything on the internet was free. Free like beer.... Sorry you had to either be there or know the history.

As time passed people realised that costs had to be paid. or to use the buzz word, things had to be monetized. So ends the hippy commune.

By that time TMF was in at least three countries (I think it began in the US). The US branch decided to go subscription. You paid for access.
The UK branch decided to try and support itself through adverts and selling stuff.

Eventually I believe that a decision was made in the UK that the boards didn't pay, hence the UK branch dropped them. While of course the US "club" was paid for by it's members so maintained the service.

I don't pay for access to TLF, possibly I should start doing so. I know that you can.

SalvorHardin
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388057

Postby SalvorHardin » February 19th, 2021, 9:40 pm

Urbandreamer wrote:By that time TMF was in at least three countries (I think it began in the US). The US branch decided to go subscription. You paid for access.

Yes, America at Fool.com was the first. Then the UK.

I've been posting on fool.com since 1997, a year before I first posted on TMF UK. TMF USA's public boards became subscriber only in the early 2000s but this only lasted for a few years.

Nowadays anyone can read the public boards (Berkshire Hathaway is a good example of an active and useful board), but to post on fool.com you need one or more of:

1) be a paying subscriber to at least one of their services
2) have been invited by a paying member (and then approved by TMF)
3) be an "old school fool", someone who has been on TMF for a long time (I think it's before 2000)

I've been paying for "Stock Adviser" for over 10 years. For me it's very useful because my five largest shareholdings are American companies (sixth and seventh are Canadian) and several of these have active private boards where "community fools" highlight lots of relevant articles.

AleisterCrowley
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388061

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 19th, 2021, 9:55 pm

TMF was odd because the core message was take control of your own finances and don't chase fads/believe tipsters
All good and proper, but (understandably) they had to actually make money from the site - and if the message is 'go and buy a cheap index tracker...' well...why sign up to a subscription share tipping service, the antithesis of the core message??
They separated off their general finance stuff (LoveMoney?) and focused on investment advice which I thought was a bit daft because they lost people in the early stages of the investor lifecycle but..hey, hindsight. Meanwhile Martin Lewis prospers, and Monevator is what TMF could have been (although he claims he doesn't make much cash out of it, so fair enough)

The TMF (UK) staff were a good bunch though. Happy times at the Grafton socials, despite the antisocial Tuesday nights

MrFoolish
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388068

Postby MrFoolish » February 19th, 2021, 10:30 pm

AleisterCrowley wrote:TMF was odd because the core message was take control of your own finances and don't chase fads/believe tipsters
All good and proper, but (understandably) they had to actually make money from the site - and if the message is 'go and buy a cheap index tracker...' well...why sign up to a subscription share tipping service, the antithesis of the core message??


Agreed. But also, their share tipping articles were formulaic ("Woodford bought this share, blah blah") and completely lacking in detailed justification. A lazy effort, you might say. Hard to know who these articles were aimed at. I always got the impression they'd hired some kids straight out of uni and paid them peanuts. Which was a shame, because they had some more interesting contributors and articles in the early days.

AsleepInYorkshire
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388069

Postby AsleepInYorkshire » February 19th, 2021, 10:40 pm

I think The Motley Fool business plan may have been more fluid than many would have wanted, including the founders.

I think Salvor makes the point that the main contributions came (and probably still do) from posters who really were quite versed at reviewing stocks and understanding how to capitalise on various strategies.

I'm sure many people are aware that there's a huge company that's based in Hull that sells everything to do with health and safety. They are called ARCO. And that's an acronym for Asbestos and Rubber Company.

It is possible to reinvent a business.

Far be it from me to analyse anything TMF have done or will do. Whilst we have a small community here it's for the most polite and helpful. I do have a little black book though :twisted: I'm the first entry :lol:

AiY

UncleEbenezer
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388086

Postby UncleEbenezer » February 20th, 2021, 12:17 am

Urbandreamer wrote:Eventually I believe that a decision was made in the UK that the boards didn't pay, hence the UK branch dropped them. While of course the US "club" was paid for by it's members so maintained the service.


I think TMF totally mishandled the closure of those boards, They had a valuable resource: a thriving community, and a level of symbiosis with the articles that brought in new blood - including me and I'm expect others who are now here but no longer there. They could have looked for a buyer or even franchising partner, and ongoing symbiosis with their remaining content!

I wrote a longish piece on and around the subject at the time, entitled "I blame Google". Cut&paste will lose lots of links - sorry.

When google comes under attack, I’m usually one of the voices in the peanut gallery defending them. That’s because most of the attacks on them, particularly the anti-trust stuff involving regulators, is grossly ill-informed and follows an Agenda that seeks to subvert Google’s central purpose of supplying the best possible search results for the person searching.

Now I’m going to attack. It may be true (as I’ve argued here before) that there’s a certain historic inevitability to the Enclosure of the Commons. But that doesn’t excuse Google’s crucial role, particularly in the demise of the Usenet commons.

The suicide and resurrection of an online community in which I participate has reminded me of that. It started on November 3rd, with an an announcement that a set of discussion boards was to close on Nov 17th. Just two weeks notice: quite a large number of boards and a thriving community. The reason given was problems with old/unmaintainable software (which had indeed left a lot to be desired), but we suspect that the more fundamental reason was that the website (which has, in other areas, a number of paid staff) was losing money.

Why they didn’t try to sell the boards – with community intact – to whomsoever thought they could make a go of it – eludes me. But that’s now water under the bridge. And it may be a long-term blessing, if a highest bidder might’ve been under financial pressure themselves and perhaps trashed the site with intrusive levels of advertising.

Of course, discussion turned to ideas for how it might be replaced. My own preferred option of a decentralised solution – individual blogs with an aggregator to focus the community – was a non-starter on that timescale, even if it could in principle have gained traction in the absence of time pressure. But someone else had a practical solution: they set up an alternative site at a new domain with well-chosen name, and phpbb driving a replacement set of boards. They announced it within hours of the closure notice, and rapidly gained traction. The community has been rapidly migrating to the new site, which now also has tremendous goodwill. Early days, but it seems we have a level of continuity, albeit with archives about to be relegated to what may be found in dusty attics.

So what has this little tale got to do with Google or Usenet? Well, the old boards originated in January 1998. The second half of the ’90s was precisely when lots of websites were making a land-grab for online discussion fora, and a rising non-techie user base would follow the best-advertised route oblivious to inherent limitations like private (often quixotic) control and single points of congestion and failure. As soon as a community moves from the Usenet commons to the private gardens – walled or otherwise – of a website, it becomes vulnerable to all kinds of things, like a rug being pulled.

Google’s role comes in their own land-grab, and in what they did to Dejanews. Actually, come to think of it, the first time I ever heard the name Google was in that context: they were a company that had bought Dejanews. So now the folks who run the fantastic Usenet search engine now also have web search, and … it turns out to be rather good, returning results more-or-less as good as Altavista but without all the clutter and crap that had made Altavista a pain to use. Nice!

But it turned out to be part of a much more sinister agenda. Google Groups started life as a WWW gateway to Usenet: all good. But the waves of new users coming through Google weren’t being told that: they saw web fora, with thriving communities. If memory serves, it was the whole of Usenet (less some of the wilds of alt.*) that had been hijacked in an audacious land grab. Old-timers found ourselves fighting a losing battle against the impression that the whole thing was Google’s territory. Google were far from the only people doing that (and public mailinglists got similar gateways), but they were unique in owning Dejanews.

But Dejanews itself disappeared. Or rather, became just a tab in an integrated Google search frontend. Then the tab wasn’t even labelled “news”, which took on the obvious meaning it still has today. Then the “groups” tab vanished: after all, the content was Google Groups, and that’s just Web content like any other, right? Over the following decade or so, Usenet content simply vanished, increasingly much of it literally so.

The community mindshare had been grabbed, except for old-timers. Search had been lost gradually and the community, like a boiling frog, had failed to react to incremental changes and create an alternative. In the face of such trends, the will to put much effort into other things like newsreader development and combating the rise of spam, also waned. The land grab has happened, the commons are lost, we live in a world of private gardens. Worse still, many including the biggest (Facebook) are walled off against us: access is limited to their registered users! And it’s very largely all Google’s fault.

If I can be [expletive deleted] I may post a followup to this, proposing a new alternative. It won’t be Usenet: that ship has sailed. It will be based on aggregation and syndication of distributed content, under the control of individuals. Damn, am I fighting the same battle I pooh-poohed Moglen for?

mc2fool
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388090

Postby mc2fool » February 20th, 2021, 12:52 am

Urbandreamer wrote:I'm HUGELY glad that TLF doesn't have a board called Does Anyone Know, DYK!

Errrr ... https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewforum.php?f=9

Lootman
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388214

Postby Lootman » February 20th, 2021, 3:31 pm

UncleEbenezer wrote:The suicide and resurrection of an online community in which I participate has reminded me of that. It started on November 3rd, with an an announcement that a set of discussion boards was to close on Nov 17th. Just two weeks notice: quite a large number of boards and a thriving community. The reason given was problems with old/unmaintainable software (which had indeed left a lot to be desired), but we suspect that the more fundamental reason was that the website (which has, in other areas, a number of paid staff) was losing money.

Why they didn’t try to sell the boards – with community intact – to whomsoever thought they could make a go of it – eludes me. But that’s now water under the bridge. And it may be a long-term blessing, if a highest bidder might’ve been under financial pressure themselves and perhaps trashed the site with intrusive levels of advertising.

I recall reading somewhere that TMF UK never made any money, and was subsidised by its US parent to the tune of a million a year, or so.

I suspect that TMF was not interested in selling the boards (assuming of course that the software was standalone and portable, and so capable of being hived off) because they did not want a rival entity having the pool of talent and potential customers that it represented. TMF would rather this population just dispersed and vanished, than hand them over to a competitor. Or perhaps TMF even believed that we would all stay loyal to TMF even after they shafted us. Fat chance, personally I have never looked at it since 2016.

It is perhaps significant that, to my knowledge, not one current or former member of TMF staff posts here. Perhaps they had to sign something saying they would not use this site. If the TMF mods really believed in the community you would think they would be here, but are in fact conspicuous by their absence.

Alaric
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388227

Postby Alaric » February 20th, 2021, 4:09 pm

Lootman wrote:It is perhaps significant that, to my knowledge, not one current or former member of TMF staff posts here.


pyad pops up from time to time on the HYP board but I believe he ceased working for TMF in the 2000s.

UncleEbenezer
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388229

Postby UncleEbenezer » February 20th, 2021, 4:17 pm

Haven't we seen another? mdw-something (from fallible memory). Or someone could be hiding behind an alias.

And we have some here (albeit among our infrequent posters) who've taught me more than reading their professionally-written contents ever did.

UncleEbenezer
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388231

Postby UncleEbenezer » February 20th, 2021, 4:23 pm

Lootman wrote:(assuming of course that the software was standalone and portable, and so capable of being hived off)

As a software man myself, I firmly believe their claims that it was poorly-written and unmaintainable. I would have ported the boards to another platform. The main effort then would've been in making the transition smooth for users, how to preserve archives, and where to draw lines where compromises prove necessary.

We've seen some of that here at Lemonfool, but with the advantage that expectations started from - in techie terms - a blank sheet.

AsleepInYorkshire
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388254

Postby AsleepInYorkshire » February 20th, 2021, 6:08 pm

Alaric wrote:
Lootman wrote:It is perhaps significant that, to my knowledge, not one current or former member of TMF staff posts here.


pyad pops up from time to time on the HYP board but I believe he ceased working for TMF in the 2000s.

We went down to a London TMF social in the early 000's. We met Stephen and a few other posters. My memory fades now, names I met (and remember) apart from Stephen were, Bullet, Simsqu, Petrea, Jayne, Chas, Dianethebrave, Cavebat and many more I just can't recall their names.

AiY

Itsallaguess
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388257

Postby Itsallaguess » February 20th, 2021, 6:29 pm

Moderator Message:
Following a number of reports I've deleted some posts on this thread that were far too personal regarding Motley Fool staff. Any further posts of a similar nature will also be removed. - Itsallaguess

AleisterCrowley
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388259

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 20th, 2021, 6:35 pm

Possibly me as well : I was a semi-regular attendee
There were the official ones at the Grafton Arms which ended due to falling numbers. The fact it was on a Tuesday probably didn't help.
I think we organised a few TMF ones ourselves, at various pubs. Not entirely sure which were TMF and which were early TLF ones. I think all the Lemon Fool ones have been at the Clachan
I never had any problems with the board moderators. TMFtarantula , the boardmaster, was (and probably still is!) a really nice chap, who had to deal with some quite combative 'personalities'....

Gostevie
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388270

Postby Gostevie » February 20th, 2021, 7:46 pm

I was a regular on the Motley Fool UK boards from 2001 to when they closed. For most of that time they comprised a vibrant and varied community, including some of the very best private investors around. However, towards the end the number of posts across the boards decreased sharply, as evidenced by the ever-diminishing number of ‘recs’ a post needed to get onto the Best Of board.

I’m not entirely sure why that was the case but it could be that some of the more experienced and eloquent investors drifted across to newer platforms such as Stockopedia and even Twitter to discuss their investment ideas, which had a snowball effect of fewer other people visiting.

I became a semi-regular at the London Socials and had some great evenings, meeting and chatting with fellow Fools and TMF staff alike. The free finger buffets always went down well too. I’m not surprised they were discontinued though. TMF UK was always loss-making and the socials were only ever going to be feasible for a tiny proportion of Fool users even though, in the summer months in particular, they would be pretty well attended for a Tuesday evening pub event.

I will always have very happy memories of my Foolish days and made friendships which last to this day but all good things come to an end, and without further investment and development which TMF UK decided wasn’t a practical use of very limited resources they had probably run their natural course.

It was a massive achievement for stooz and Clariman to set up The Lemon Fool so quickly.

AleisterCrowley
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Re: The Motley Fool

#388274

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 20th, 2021, 8:02 pm

Snorvey wrote:... also got the chance to meet Berteee, Melonfool Halluciageia (sp?)

Ah, Hallucigenia - he did post on here but I haven't seen anything from him for ages. I think he moved to the North, so he may have been eaten by dragons or something


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